Peer2Politics

The latest ECB Economic Bulletin states: “In Portugal, the 2009-13 reforms have already raised the levels of productivity and potential GDP.

An emerging relationship between the state and a commons-based civil society is starting to challenge the narrow thinking of the UK’s main political parties

As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, "administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country."1 There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he calls ominously the "the all administrative university," noting that it does not bode well for any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere.2

The commanding institutions of society are now in the hands of powerful corporate interests whose strangulating control over politics renders democracy corrupt and dysfunctional, says Henry A. Giroux.

In one of his last books Eric Hobsbawm argued that the conflict between capitalism and communism determined the course of the twentieth century (thus the title, The Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991).

But, with the prospects for an urgently needed green economy being suffocated daily by business as usual, how difficult can it be to rewrite the failing, founding principles of mainstream, planet-eating, people-crushing, neoliberal economics? Not difficult at all, it turns out. In some cases you just need to change a few words to turn the world around. With celebrities talking revolution, students walking out of unreconstructed university economics lectures, and allegations flying of departments stuck in doctrine and dogma, it could prove a timely correction, as market analysts might say.